Foreword

by Raph Koster

You might wonder why I'm the one writing a foreword to this book. After all, this book doesn't have very kind things to say about game designers. I think they merit maybe half a page, with a grudging admission that they are useful and even valuable ”and many pages worth of "don't trust 'em" admonitions that are enough to make you think that they probably burgle your house at night and make off with your family heirlooms and your grandmother's jewelry .

If you ask me (one such crazy designer), online game design is actually the tough nut to crack. After all, things like how to run a service business, how to manage a large team, how to budget time correctly for large-scale beta testing, how to manage a gaming community the size of Cincinnati ”those things are theoretically well- understood , right? Right? The issues that are coming down the pike, like the legality of commerce in virtual assets, untangling the mess of statutes governing online communications (Free speech? Publication? Telephone conversation?), empowering player-entered content without further harming the already-wounded concept of intellectual property ”those are to my mind the real challenges.

You won't find those topics in this book. That's because those pie-in-the-sky topics are completely useless unless you understand the basics.

No, this book isn't really about online game design. It's about the nitty-gritty details of what it takes to actually make and launch an online game. And as such, it's long overdue. After all, we've been making online games commercially now for nigh on two decades, and we keep seeing the same mistakes being made: people forgetting that online games are a service industry, not a packaged goods industry; people forgetting to budget enough time for quality assurance; the fact that you only get one launch, so you had better make it damn impressive.

Other than the fact that this book neglects designers to such a shameful degree, it's basically indispensable . If you follow all the advice in it, you're much more likely to successfully create and launch an online game. What most reassures those of us already in the industry, which we find plenty competitive enough already, thank you, is that you're liable to ignore the advice.

Why do I say that? Well, because the authors, Jessica and Bridgette, have been proclaiming this particular gospel from the mountaintops for much of those two decades. They have many accumulated years worth of hands-on knowledge of the genre . If people haven't listened to them by now, they're probably not going to. Which leaves more room in the market for the smart people ”those who listened.

The fact of the matter is that the history of online game development is littered with very expensive carcasses. Companies that failed to appreciate basic lessons from the carcasses of companies previous. Teams that were convinced that they, and only they, had the magic key to unlock all the wonders (and infinite money, perhaps?) of the mainstream online game. In a word, arrogance , and its close cousin hubris .

I'll let you in on a secret ”the smartest people in game development or indeed any walk of life are those who never stop learning. Who aren't afraid of good ideas and information regardless of their source. Who aren't afraid to learn from their mistakes, however painful those mistakes may have been.

And that, perhaps, may be the most valuable thing about this book ”it's a compendium of the mistakes made, and the lessons learned from them. Don't tell anyone , but there's even one particularly embarrassing anecdote featuring yours truly, which the authors kindly left my name off of. Look at it this way ”I made the mistake, and now Jess and Bridgette tell you about it so that you don't have to make it yourself.

We're facing an interesting time period in online game development. The budgets are rising rapidly , and the team sizes are climbing commensurately. The minimum feature set required for a competitive persistent world as I write this has nearly doubled in length over the course of the last five years ”and the time allotted to the development cycle isn't expanding to match. It's an exciting time, but also an increasingly competitive time. It will not be long until really serious money starts chasing the dream of cyberspace that has been articulated by so many science fiction authors over the years. We're already seeing budgets north of $20 million dollars for a triple-A massively multiplayer role-playing game. This is not territory that most developers are used to playing in, nor is it forgiving of ignorance.

There's a paucity of material to refer to out there in the world. But in this book, you will find a sizable chunk of the accumulated wisdom of many veterans , taken directly from their experiences in the trenches. Some of them are even game designers (but don't discount their words merely because of that one damning fact). You'll read about the stories of failed launches, and what went right with the ones that worked. You'll learn why it is that getting the "casual online game player" to pay a monthly subscription fee is akin to a mythical quest for the end of the rainbow. You'll grow to appreciate the fact that 90% of the hard work in online gaming comes after you finish building the game ”precisely at the moment when a single-player game shop says "phew!" and has a ship party followed by a vacation.

As far as the value to designers, well, I was actually teasing. Check out Chapter 2, "Planning and Budgeting," if you want to know what the real obstacle to tackling the fun design problems is: a failure to organize and manage the design process effectively. Most massively multiplayer RPG projects start out with grand visions and don't even get halfway there simply because they underestimate the difficulty of getting just the basics in place. And for that as well, this book offers a roadmap.

Perhaps the best material in the book, however, is at the very end: the appendices with case studies, lessons learned, and practical advice taken directly from those who have been there ”and I don't mean been there in the distant past when everything was done differently from today or people who've made a MUD or two and think they know all there is to know about persistent world gaming ”no, I mean people who are working actively right now in the field, learning and making fresh mistakes right on the cutting edge.

Online worlds are hard . I've been doing them for only seven years or so, and hardly a day goes by when I don't get a sinking feeling in my stomach, realizing that some whole new area of knowledge is missing from my library. Thankfully, this volume goes a long way toward filling some of the shameful gap on the bookshelves. Read it ”memorize it even. Don't get too caught up in the figures and numbers ”those are bound to change, may even be outdated by the time this sees print. Focus on the core lessons, because those are unchanging.

Then maybe we can see about cracking those tough design issues and opening the doors to cyberspace with projects built on solid fundamentals. As Bridgette puts it, indulge in a little more of the "esoteric, dream-state BS" precisely because we know we've gotten the basics right. And maybe by then designers won't have such a bad rap, because we'll know better.

Raph  Koster
Dec.  15 ^th ,  2002